logicsrc/docs/openicon.md

OpenIcon

OpenIcon is an icon set as a folder: one openicon.json at the top that names every icon, says where its files are and who or what drew it, and gives each icon three terminal glyphs, so the same mail icon is an SVG in a browser, a PNG in an email, 󰇰 in a terminal with a Nerd Font, ✉ in one without, and @ over a serial line. It is maintained by Profullstack, Inc. as part of the LogicSRC open-standards surface.

Status: 0.1. A sibling of OpenEmoji: files first, one small descriptor, made_by on the work.

Slug: openicon

The problem

Every interface needs the same few hundred icons: mail, phone, link, search, settings, a trash can, a GitHub logo. Every icon set ships them under its own names (Lucide's mail is Font Awesome's envelope is Material's email), in its own folder layout, with its licence in a README, and with brand logos mixed in beside drawn icons as if a trademark were just another shape.

Terminals are worse. A TUI that wants an icon has three choices, all bad: hard-code a Nerd Font codepoint and show a box on every terminal without one, hard-code an emoji and break the column width, or draw nothing. No icon set says what an icon should be when there are no pixels at all.

The shape

openicon.json          the descriptor (rule 1)
svg/<key>.svg          24x24, currentColor
png/<size>/<key>.png   rendered from the SVG
sprite.svg             every icon as a <symbol>, optional

{
  "openicon": "0.1",
  "name": "OpenIcon",
  "version": "2026-09-24",
  "license": "MIT",
  "made_by": "ai",
  "disclosure": "ai-generated",
  "ai_model": "claude-opus-5-5",
  "ai_provider": "Anthropic",
  "grid": { "size": 24, "stroke": 2, "padding": 2 },
  "sizes": [16, 20, 24, 32, 48, 64, 128, 256],
  "sprite": "sprite.svg",
  "icons": [
    {
      "key": "mail",
      "name": "Mail",
      "category": "communication",
      "aliases": ["email", "envelope"],
      "keywords": ["message", "inbox"],
      "svg": "svg/mail.svg",
      "png": "png/{size}/mail.png",
      "tui": { "nerd": "󰇰", "nerd_code": "f01f0", "nerd_name": "md-email_outline", "unicode": "✉", "ascii": "@" }
    },
    {
      "key": "github",
      "name": "GitHub",
      "category": "brand",
      "brand": true,
      "trademark": "GitHub and its logo are trademarks of their owner. Use them to refer to GitHub, not to imply endorsement.",
      "source": "simple-icons:github",
      "license": "CC0-1.0",
      "made_by": "human",
      "svg": "svg/github.svg",
      "png": "png/{size}/github.png",
      "tui": { "nerd": "󰊤", "nerd_code": "f02a4", "nerd_name": "md-github", "unicode": "🐙", "ascii": "gh" }
    }
  ]
}

Two entries from the reference set: a drawn icon and a brand logo.

The rules

There are eight for the canonical style, three more for an optional colour style, two more for a set that ships several of them, and every one of them degrades rather than fails.

1. A set is a folder with openicon.json at its root. Every path is relative to that file. Top-level keys a reader should understand: openicon (the spec version, required), name (required), version, license (SPDX, covering every icon without its own), homepage, grid, sizes, sprite and icons (required). Unknown keys are kept and ignored.

2. An icon's key is its name, in kebab case. Lowercase letters and digits joined by single hyphens: mail, git-pull-request, arrow-up-right. The key is also the file name. A brand's key is the brand's own name in the same form (github, stack-overflow), never a product code.

3. Aliases find one icon; keywords find many. aliases are other names people type for the icon (email for mail, trash for delete), and every key and alias in a set is unique, so icon('email') is never ambiguous. keywords are search terms and may be shared (money finds wallet, dollar and coins). A reader resolves a name against keys first, then aliases.

4. Files are monochrome and take the text colour. An SVG uses currentColor for every stroke and fill and a 0 0 24 24 view box. grid states the drawing rules the set keeps (size, stroke width, padding), so a reader mixing sets can scale one to match another. png may contain {size}, filled from sizes; PNGs are rendered in one colour, which the set's README states. A set without PNGs or without a sprite is still a set.

5. Every icon has terminal glyphs. tui.unicode is one character or emoji that says the same thing, and tui.ascii is 1 to 4 printable ASCII characters, spaces only inside ([ ], >_, @). tui.nerd is the Nerd Font character when there is one, with nerd_code (hex) and nerd_name (the Nerd Fonts glyph name, without nf-), so a reader can check it against the Nerd Fonts release it has. An icon with no Nerd Font glyph leaves the three nerd fields out.

6. A terminal picks the best glyph it can draw. Nerd first, then Unicode, then ASCII. A Nerd Font cannot be detected from inside a terminal, so a reader takes it from configuration: OPENICON_GLYPHS=nerd|unicode|ascii wins, NERD_FONT=1 means nerd, a UTF-8 locale means unicode, anything else means ascii. A reader that reserves a fixed cell width pads to it, because an emoji may be two columns wide where a Nerd glyph is one.

7. A brand says it is one. A logo carries brand: true, a trademark note, its source (simple-icons:<slug>, font-awesome:<name>, or a URL) and its own license, because the licence of a drawing is not permission to use a mark. Brand logos are taken from their owners or from a set that publishes them; a set does not redraw them.

A colour style may re-render a mark in its own material, and that is not a redrawing: the geometry is fixed. Every shape, proportion, counter and piece of negative space stays exactly as the owner published it, figure and ground are never inverted, nothing is added, simplified or set on a container the mark does not have. What a style changes is the surface — a flat plane, a milled face, a lit panel — and never the mark. A style that cannot hold a mark to that leaves it alone (rule 10), and a mark re-rendered this way says so (rule 11): it is both, because the geometry is the owner's and the material is the set's.

8. The set says what made it. made_by is human, ai or both, the OpenWebring vocabulary, and disclosure, ai_model, ai_provider and ai_prompt_url are the W3C AI Content Disclosure vocabulary, as in OpenEmoji. Any of them may be repeated on an icon that differs from the set: in the reference set the drawn icons are ai, a brand logo left flat is human, and a mark re-rendered in a style's material is both — the geometry came from its owner and the surface from an image model, and neither half is the whole truth.

Styles: simple, and the colour styles

A set has one canonical style, simple: the monochrome, currentColor files the rules above describe. It may add colour styles: the same icons in full colour, drawn to a higher finish for places where an icon is shown large or alone (a launcher, an empty state, a marketing page). A colour style never replaces simple; a reader that knows nothing about them loses nothing.

The first one was HQ, and a colour style is not one look forever: HQ was drawn beside glossy 3D emoji masters, which reads as the decade it borrows from. A set may therefore carry several, and the reference set carries four — hq plus three flat-material agentic styles (agentic-matte, agentic-machined, agentic-emissive) for interfaces that would rather not look like a 2004 dock. Rules 9 to 11 describe one colour style, rules 12 and 13 describe a set that has more than one.

9. HQ is optional, per icon, and follows simple. A set with an HQ style says so at the top level, "styles": ["simple", "hq"], and describes it once:

"hq": {
  "sizes": [16, 20, 24, 32, 48, 64, 128, 256],
  "webp_sizes": [64, 128],
  "made_by": "both",
  "ai_model": "gpt-image-2",
  "ai_provider": "OpenAI",
  "ai_prompt_url": "hq/style.txt",
  "coverage": { "total": 370, "done": 370 }
}

Each icon that has it carries an hq block with its own files and provenance:

"hq": { "png": "hq/png/{size}/mail.png", "webp": "hq/webp/{size}/mail.webp", "made_by": "ai" }
"hq": { "png": "hq/png/{size}/github.png", "webp": "hq/webp/{size}/github.webp", "svg": "hq/svg/github.svg",
        "made_by": "human", "hex": "#181717", "hex_source": "simple-icons:github" }

An HQ icon depicts what its simple icon depicts, with the same silhouette, so a reader can swap one for the other without a layout changing meaning. An icon without an hq block falls back to simple. HQ files carry their own colour and never use currentColor.

10. A brand's colour is its owner's. A brand logo in a colour style carries the owner's published colour, never a guess: hex is that colour and hex_source says where it is published (a Simple Icons slug, or the brand's own guidelines page). A logo whose owner publishes no colour has no coloured form.

A style has two honest ways to use that colour, and both keep it. It can leave the mark flat — the simple logo filled with hex, which is what hq does — or it can re-render the mark in its material under rule 7, where the material acts on the owner's colour rather than replacing it: a red mark stays red, a blue mark stays blue. A style may never recolour a mark to suit itself, wash it to white, grey or a single neutral, or give it a hue the owner does not publish.

One material cannot always obey that, and the spec says what to do rather than leaving it to a drawing. A style that works by emitting light needs a colour bright enough to emit, and a mark that is too dark has three outcomes: it emits its own colour when it can; a mark that is dark but still coloured emits a lighter tint of that same hue; and a mark that is dark with no hue left — a black wordmark — emits neutral white, because inventing a hue for it would be a guess and rule 10 forbids guesses. In the reference set 85 of the 111 marks emit their own colour, 4 a tint of it, and 22 neutral white.

11. Provenance is per style. made_by, disclosure and the ai_* fields on the hq block describe the HQ files, not the simple ones. In the reference set, simple icons are authored as SVG and HQ icons are drawn by an image model from them, so the same icon is ai in one style and says so in each.

12. More than one colour style is a map, not a second name. A set that ships several lists them in styles — simple first, then the colour styles in the order they were added — and describes each one in style_info, keyed by the same ids:

"styles": ["simple", "hq", "agentic-matte", "agentic-machined", "agentic-emissive"],
"style_info": {
  "agentic-matte": {
    "dir": "styles/agentic-matte",
    "label": "Agentic Matte",
    "material": "Flat tonal planes with hard boundaries and one cool edge-light: form without gloss.",
    "sizes": [16, 20, 24, 32, 48, 64, 128, 256],
    "webp_sizes": [64, 128],
    "made_by": "both",
    "ai_model": "gpt-image-2",
    "ai_provider": "OpenAI",
    "ai_prompt_url": "styles/agentic-matte/style.txt",
    "coverage": { "total": 370, "done": 370 }
  }
}

Each icon carries its colour styles the same way, in a styles map keyed by id, each entry shaped exactly as rule 9's hq block:

"styles": {
  "hq": { "png": "hq/png/{size}/mail.png", "webp": "hq/webp/{size}/mail.webp", "made_by": "ai" },
  "agentic-matte": { "png": "styles/agentic-matte/png/{size}/mail.png",
                     "webp": "styles/agentic-matte/webp/{size}/mail.webp", "made_by": "ai" }
}

A set that has an hq style keeps writing the top-level hq block and the per-icon hq key from rule 9 as well, so a reader written against the first HQ release keeps working. They are the same objects under an older name, never a different drawing. Every rule about HQ holds for every colour style: same silhouette as simple (rule 9), owner's colour for a brand (rule 10), provenance per style (rule 11).

Styles differ in how far they take a brand, and the entry says which without a reader having to compare files. A style that leaves marks flat writes svg on them and made_by: "human": the file is the owner's logo filled with hex. A style that re-renders them under rule 7 writes no svg and made_by: "both", because the material only exists in the raster. A reader wanting the plain mark takes the simple style, which is canonical and always has it; a reader that preferred svg wherever it found one would silently show the flat logo in a style that had drawn the mark, which is the one mistake this distinction exists to prevent.

13. A style says what it is for, and a reader may refuse it. label names it and material is one line on what it is made of, because the choice between colour styles is a choice of surface: a style built from near-black bodies and lit accents is right on a dark terminal and illegible on a printed page, and only the set knows which is which. A reader that shows icons at a fixed small size should prefer the style the set names first. A family of related styles shares a prefix and the family name alone means its default member: in the reference set agentic means agentic-matte, the one that holds its colour coding at 20 pixels on a light ground as well as a dark one.

Discovery

• A <link rel="openicon" href="/icons/openicon.json"> in a page's head: this page draws its icons from that set.
• /.well-known/openicon.json on a site: a set, or a list of sets, {"openicon": "0.1", "sets": [{"name": "…", "url": "…/openicon.json"}]}.
• A package: a set published to npm, PyPI or a git repository keeps openicon.json at the package root. Served as JSON with CORS open.

Mapping from what exists

OpenIcon	Lucide	Tabler	Font Awesome	Nerd Fonts	Simple Icons
key	icon name	icon name	icon name	glyph name after the prefix	slug
aliases	aliases in the icon's JSON	none	aliases.names	none	aliases.aka
keywords	tags	tags	search.terms	none	none
category	categories	category	categories	the font the glyph came from	none
grid	24, stroke 2	24, stroke 2	512 tall, filled	a font cell	24, filled
tui.nerd	none	none	the codepoint, in a patched font	the codepoint	none
brand	none (no brands)	a few, unmarked	the brands style	some, unmarked	every icon
license per icon	none	none	per style	none	one for all (CC0)

An importer from any of these is a rename and a copy. Only tui.unicode and tui.ascii need a person or a model to write them, because none of the sets carries them.

What is deliberately absent

• No colour in the canonical style. Simple icons are monochrome and take the text colour. Colour lives only in the optional colour styles (rules 9 to 13).
• No style variants of the drawing. Outline, filled and duotone versions of one icon are three sets, or three icons with three keys. One key, one drawing. A colour style is a material over that one drawing, not a second drawing of it.
• No icon font format. A webfont is a build output a set may ship, not part of the spec; the SVGs and the tui glyphs are the interchange.
• No registry of names. Keys are the set's own. Aliases are how one set answers to another's names.
• No animation. A spinner is a component, not an icon.

Reference implementation

The reference set is profullstack/openicon: 370 icons, 259 drawn on a 24x24 grid with 2px strokes and 111 brand logos from Simple Icons and Font Awesome Free. 357 of them have a Nerd Font glyph. The hq style leaves the marks flat in their owners' colours; the three agentic styles re-render them in the material under rule 7. It is built by icon in profullstack/cli-tools:

icon build --out ./openicon   # openicon.json, svg/, png/, sprite.svg
icon glyph mail               # 󰇰, ✉ or @, whichever this terminal can draw
icon agentic all              # the three flat-material colour styles

hqtui ships the set as its default icon pack, so icon('mail') in a TUI draws the best glyph the terminal has.

Related: OpenEmoji for the sibling format; OpenWebring for made_by.